Gabriel Prokofiev: Nonclassical Directions, LSO St Luke's

In a week in which the nation has debated the relevance of classical music, it was left to the LSO’s Eclectica concert series to have the final word. Incorporating world and electronic music alongside traditional chamber works and contemporary programmes, Eclectica’s concerts offer dressed-down, laid-back forays down the roads less travelled of the classical repertoire. With one of the 20th century’s musical greats as a grandfather and a growing reputation for his work as a producer, DJ and composer, incorporating classical music into a club idiom and setting, who better than Gabriel Prokofiev to weigh in on the debate?

Before I get to the good however – and there was plenty – just a few issues of housekeeping. It’s not a good plan to schedule a concert at 8pm on a Tuesday night if it means that you are only starting a concerto at 10pm. However rock'n'roll it may seem, it’s just a nuisance, and a problem that could so easily have been avoided if the programme had actually been curated with some thought for the audience rather than just crammed indiscriminately full with as much as possible. Two hours in and I was seized with that panicked feeling you get when you find yourself stuck with a record fanatic with access to his (and it’s usually his) record collection. “You must just listen to this. Oh, and this…”

Timekeeping aside, the set-up at LSO St Luke’s is a delight. An 18th-century church restored and transformed with steel walkways and spiral staircases, the effect is half Hawksmoor, half Jack Bauer’s CTU – a sympathetic space for the musical restorations and reinventions of Prokofiev and his collaborators.

We opened with the only non-Prokofiev work of the evening, David Lang’s controlled frenzy for solo percussion The Anvil Chorus, a sort of contemporary incarnation of Mosolov’s The Foundry, championed at last year’s Proms. With video footage of percussionist Joby Burgess (pictured below) projected onto a large screen, we were able to follow the skill of the work’s rhythmic patternings (eyes supplementing what ears miss in the maelstrom), and get a good look at some of the odder percussion “instruments” involved. Burgess’s skill was as dazzling as some of Lang’s temporal manipulations and shiftings, which had me longing to get a look at the score.

Burgess returned for another demonstration of his virtuoso skills in import/export. Combining Prokofiev’s score with sound design by Matthew Fairclough and projected cinematic visuals by Kathy Hinde, import/export is far more enjoyable than a black-and-white silent film about heavy industry, soundtracked by makeshift percussion, has any right to be. Matching its instruments to its visuals (an oil drum provided metallic energy for the manufacture of petrol, Fanta bottles for a bottling factory, a wooden crate for a lumber episode) the live-looped effects were less innovative than Prokofiev seemed to find them (and have already been bettered by Matthew Herbert), but the whole had a pleasing aural symmetry about it, with some inventive touches like the scrunched plastic bags that became a vivid on-screen rain shower.

An untitled suite for cello and eight loudspeakers (played live by Peter Gregson) also had its charms – “Tough Strum” was a fragile epic, its plucked textures like hundreds of moths trapped under the skin, softly convulsing – but it was hard not to see the pre-recorded, multi-track textures as a rather perverse contradiction of the live concert experience; there was nothing in the technical approach that couldn’t have been more satisfactorily (if not quite so cheaply) achieved with nine live cellists. The composer’s own descriptions between movements, explaining the (rather oblique) influences of rave and grime, also felt unnecessary, aurally framing and gift-wrapping the experience for us before we’d had a chance to hear it with fresh ears.

I couldn’t warm to Stolen Guitars, a suite of rather indulgent vignettes for electric guitar ensemble, but was won over by the cartoon speed and serious musicianship of DJ Switch – current World Champion DJ – who closed the evening with a solo arrangement of Prokofiev’s signature Concerto for Turntables. It’s a great work, with some heady Gershwin-inspired shades colouring an otherwise rather Russian, 20th-century palette, and plenty of in-built rhythmic energy even before you add the mixing effects. Looped and mixed live (here set against a recorded orchestral track), the aural effects were last night heightened by the video projections, allowing us to marry up the intricate maypole-dance of gestures on the decks with the sound warping we were hearing. At four movements it felt too long without the presence of a live orchestra, but it’s a work I'd gladly make the trip to a concert hall to hear again.

Creativity and risk-taking are both a part of Prokofiev’s music, and whether you call it classically inspired electronica or electronically influenced contemporary music, the result has much of the fusion energy I struggled to find in DJ Kissy Sell Out’s work. Yes, there are some teething problems and some works get lost in translation, but overall it was an evening that succeeded in wiping just some of the dirt from that filthiest of words: “relevant”.

• See what's on this season at LSO St Luke's
• Find Gabriel Prokofiev on Amazon